Ever have “one of those days” at the range? Yeah, that was me yesterday.

You should at least provide a lesson for someone else.

So, here is my story and lesson 🙂

My Crossbreed IWB holster for my new Glock 43 had arrived, and my OWB holster from GunGoddess.com was on order, so I decided to take the new baby out for another spin yesterday.

I had my range bag all packed, and the separate target bag laid out in the kitchen by the garage door. My target bag is a largish zippered plastic bag that bedding comes in. ( I can never bring myself to throw such items away – and no, I’m not a hoarder — yet.) I find it very handy to keep duct tape, staple gun, sheets of scrap cardboard and targets organized in for a trip to the range.

Which is all well and good as long as said bag actually makes it into the car for said trip. ARGH. Granted, I don’t live too far from the range, but given the time I had, it would have been a giant pain in the patoot to run back home for my target bag. Fortunately, I have a key to the range house at the club where they keep the bases, posts and cardboard.

Which would also have been well and good, except that the club staple gun which is attached to the wall by a cable (so no one can walk off with it) was empty, and no refill box was in sight. ARGH.

But – improvise, adapt, and overcome, as they say. I rummaged around amongst the scrap cardboard in the range house, and came up with a hunk that was long/tall enough to stand on end at a reasonable height, and narrow enough to fit into the bottom of the railroad tie/ target stand in the pistol bay. Yay! Still improvising, I found a random pen in my car and made a few X’s for aim points.

I wasn’t doing too badly at defensive distances, and from a knee. But then, after shooting several magazines worth of ammo, and leaving the gun lay on the range barrel in the sun for a couple minutes while I collected brass, yours truly decided it would be a hot idea to reholster. 

Protip: If your IWB holster is open at the bottom, and you don’t have an undershirt on, you might want to wait for the gun to cool off before reholstering. Hot barrel and slide – meet tender hip flesh. Sunnovamotherduckling!!! I’ve heard the term reholstering “hot” before, but this gave the term a whole new meaning. Don’t try this at home , kiddies – Ouch!  Fortunately, there was no blistering, but the pain alone left a permanent impression.

    ( You wouldn’t think that such a small end of hot metal could cause such pain)

   (A hot gun barrel, plus hot sun on a hot range barrel, equals hot squared, or maybe cubed)

It finally occurred to me that this string of mild mal-occurrences might be trying to tell me something, so I decided to quit for the day before I really hurt myself – LOL. Still, as the saying goes – A bad day on the range beats a good day at the office – so it was still a good trip. I even came out ahead in the brass department. I collected probably 5 times what I actually shot. But I was careful to leave a few pieces behind as an offering to the range gods who kept my bad day from becoming a terrible day. 

Final Protip: ALWAYS keep the range gods happy. You never know when you might need them 🙂